Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progres...

Models of cultural evolution study how the distribution of cultural traits changes over time. The dynamics of cultural evolution strongly depends on the way these traits are transmitted between individuals by social learning. Two prominent forms of social learning are payoff-based learning (imitating others that have higher payoffs) and conformist learning (imitating locally common behaviours)....

The amount of digitized cultural heritage in Europe continues to grow: the digitization activities have a positive impact on the society, by making the cultural heritage more accessible for the citizens, and by generating benefits to the content owners. Several questions arise about digitized cultural heritage: how can digital cultural data be re-used at best, what is the impact on society and ...

Politeness, as a universal phenomenon in society, is a reflection of specific cultural values, which can be observed in all languages and cultures. This thesis attempts to make a comparative study of politeness behavior between English and Chinese on the contrastive analyses on such linguistic behaviors as addressing, greeting, complimenting. Owing to different beliefs and values, and different...

A powerful means to understand young children's normative development in context is to examine their everyday activities. The daily activities of 79 children (3 years old) were observed, for 20 hr each, in their usual settings. Children were selected from 4 cultural groups: European American and African American (Greensboro, United States), Luo (Kisumu, Kenya), and European descent (Porto Alegr...

The study aimed to adapt to the Portuguese language and to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Nursing Activities Score (NAS), an instrument for measuring the nursing workload in ICUs. After the process of cross-cultural adaptation, the NAS was applied to a sample of 200 adult ICU patients. The analysis of internal consistency by Cronbach's alpha coefficient revealed that the NAS has 23...

ANDASA is a knowledge management platform for the capitalization of knowledge and cultural assets for the artistic and cultural sectors. It was built based on the priorities expressed by the participating artists. Through mapping artistic activities and specificities, it enables to highlight various aspects of the artistic research and production. Such instrument will contribute to create netwo...

Reflecting the commitments undertaken by the EU through the conclusion of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), the European Disability Strategy 2010–2020 not only gives a prominent position to accessibility, broadly interpreted, but also suggests an examination of the obligations for access to cultural goods and services. The European Disability Str...

The Cultural Journeys in the Information Society is a dynamic hypermedia environment, which proposes the Electronic Roads as a meta-form for exploring cultural information that can form Cultural Journeys. The Electronic Roads meta-form facilitates travelers to explore the information space in a natural and continuous way similar to the exploration of physical roads. This meta-form is advantageo...

Cultural heritage collections are essential knowledge infrastructures that reflect the different cultures and civilizations revealed in certain temporal and spatial frames. They provide a solid representation of the historical background of human communities, the development of their linguistic idioms, the blooming or withering of their artistic expression, while in cases of international aggre...